Gregory Wolfe on Art & Creativity on National Review Online

From Being! or Nothingness comes This reflection by Gregory Wolfe on Art & Creativity.

Whether touching on the theme of the film Amadeus or profiling the literary accomplishments of Flannery O'Connor, Mr. Wolfe gets it. He's careful to discern the difference between the desolate artist and the beautiful art. He demonstrates the importance all artists have to be channels of what Tolkien describes as subcreation. He describes creativity as "the invitation to virtue." He notes the important vocation all artists have to create from the created in an analagous way that the Creator fashions reality from nothing, as he cites Flannery O'Connor's experience:

For O’Connor, however, writing fiction involved more than the virtue, or habit, of disciplined effort. She believed that creating a convincing, enduring world in a story requires the author to achieve a difficult balance: between judgment and mercy, reason and mystery, nature and grace. She saw the model of perfect balance in the Incarnation of Christ, who was both human and divine, infinitely holy yet infinitely merciful. She would have agreed with J.R.R. Tolkien that the artist (or creative person in general) engages in an act of “subcreation” — not creating out of nothing, as God does, but creating a microcosm in a manner analogous to that of the Creator.

Good storytelling, she held, was grounded in metaphysical concerns. The creative writer tells us about lives where something ultimate is at stake. “Where there is no belief in the soul” and its need for salvation, she once wrote, “there is very little drama.”

How extraordinarily refreshing to see art spoken of in relation to transcendence. For too long, postmodernist ideology has trumped artistic achievement. Cleverness in manipulation medium, in order to provide the maximum of absurd constructions, has too long dominated the prominent fields of all art. Beauty is lost to the grotesque in this "Art". Mr. Wolfe argues for nothing less than a return of art to beauty through incarnational means. We cannot be co-creators until we live in relationship with the Creator. Thus, spirituality must trump ideology. Then we can get out of our own way and tell the Truth no matter what anyone else says. As a writer, I find this exortion both challenging and comforting. May more calls like this come our way!